In Vietnam and elsewhere, ‘disaster capitalism’ is at play

Nature and the poor are paying the price for profits earned by the rich.

There is a Vietnamese folk tale about an old couple who lived in northern
Vietnam for 30 years, overcoming together two big storms and five big
floods.

Though it is a folk tale, its details are drawn from true experiences of
northerners.

In the modern world, that tale can never be true.

The north and north central regions just suffered two storms in two
consecutive months, Son Tinh in July and Bebinca in August. The two entered
Vietnam almost on the same route, triggering heavy rains in the entire northern
and central northern regions, leading to flashfloods and landslides in the
northern uplands and then serious flooding in the capital city of Hanoi.

Those days when it was raining cats and dogs in Hanoi, I was stuck at home.
I could not even call a cab and even if I could, traffic was paralyzed because
of the floods.

Those days, I slept on many thoughts.

I watched TV to catch up on news about the two storms. What I saw was the
serious damage they caused for my people. Hundreds of houses were washed away,
dozens of people were killed or missing. All of these tragedies happened in the
uplands, where residents are still mired in poverty. And most of the victims
were children, the elderly, women, and weaker people.

It was heartbreaking for me to see house after house being swept away by the
floods or collapsed by landslides. Just imagine that those houses were ours,
and that we lost everything, including our loved ones. How our life would be,
then?

In the south, the Mekong Delta - the nation’s rice bowl, is also at
risk.

The seasonal floods are happening much sooner than normal, and a large
amount of the water came from the collapse of a partially-constructed
hydropower dam in the Mekong’s upper reaches in Laos in July.

Farmers have lost their crops and seen their houses being threatened or
washed away by floods. Erosion and subsidence have happened at more than one
place in the delta and once again, it is the poor that lose the most.

On the contrary, the southern-central and Central Highlands regions have
been dealing with drought. Locals here have been wishing for just a few drops
of rain to save their farms and cattle. And as the rain does not come, they
have dug deeper and deeper into the ground to get water and the level of
underground water keeps dropping, guaranteeing no stable future for the
regions’ residents.

It is understandable that nature is to blame the nature for the disasters,
but the imbalance of the ecosystem caused by humans should be taken into
serious consideration.

The world has been warned of climate change and global warming due to
greenhouse effects for a long time, and in 1992, the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio De Janeiro highlighted the
dangers.

In fact, the effects of climate change caused by human activities have
arrived sooner than predicted.

Storms, tropical depressions, heavy rains, and tornadoes are happening with
greater frequency and intensity. Heavy rains usually cause flash floods,
flooding and landslides, especially because the watershed forests are now
completely destroyed.

Who profits, who pays

Greenhouse gas emissions are a product of industrial development, and it is
the investors that have earned the profits from this. It is this pursuit of
profit that has emitted greenhouse gases, which, in turn, lead to storms, flash
floods and flooding that take away everything from the poor and the
vulnerable.

And then there’s the overexploitation of natural resources.

Even if the ecosystem is left alone, it takes a lot of time and effort for
Mother Nature to keep things in balance.

But now, so many people are getting rich by taking sand from the riverbed,
draining underground water, excavating the earth for mining, and cutting down
forests for timber, just taking as much as they can. Thanks to them, the
natural balance that is so hard to maintain has been broken. And once again,
everything that poor people have is either destroyed or swallowed by
rivers.

We have to confront the fact that natural disasters have been taking place
more often and on a larger scale, not because of nature but because of human
action.

And it is the rich people that are irresponsible and unprincipled. And they
are not in any particular country, but all over the world. And the poor
worldwide suffer because of the actions of the rich.

The profits that the rich make have caused greenhouse gas emissions and
ecological imbalances. The money that the rich earn is tainted by lives that
“natural” calamities take and the suffering that they inflict.

Countries need people who know how to get rich. But they should do it in a
responsible way that does not take away the properties and lives of others.

As for the authorities, they should realize that their direct facilitation
of the rich has direct impacts on the poor.